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Friday

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Steve

July 10, 2026 at 5:22 am · Reply

Interesting article on relative crime prevalence between the USA, Australia and Canada that provides a different perspective on the perceived notion that America has higher crime than most other developed nations. That said, it is based largely upon crime victimization surveys rather than actual reported crime statistics, so I’m not sure how much stock to put in it. I’m teetering on the edge of ‘worth considering’ and ‘not much at all’. Regardless, it’s an interesting take.

The one thing I do buy with great certainty is that crime is grossly under-reported everywhere and that crime statistics should be treated with the similar skepticism to crime surveys. The hope is that the truth is somewhere in the middle, so you should consider both.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/07/09/mythbuster_us_much_safer_than_many_peer_nations_1193400.html

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is the most violent and dangerous nation in the developed world. This dark view is frequently invoked by conservatives to demand stronger penalties for crimes and by progressives to argue for stronger gun laws.

At the same time, other nations point to crime as an Achilles heel of the American system. These include two peer nations with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world – Australia and Canada. In 2025, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that “the U.S. generally sees higher violent crime rates than many other countries.” Last year, the Canadian Press similarly reported that “the number of police-reported violent crimes for every 100,000 people continue to be higher in the United States than in Canada.”

The data, however, undercuts this narrative. While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.

Regarding homicide, the most heinous crime of all, it’s true that in 2025, the U.S. murder rate was about four per 100,000 people – roughly twice Australia’s and Canada’s 2024 homicide rate. Yet it’s also true that homicides account for only a tiny fraction of violent crime.

There is one crime statistic that visitors to the USA might want to keep in mind if worried about crime ….

Murders in the U.S. are usually highly concentrated geographically, often connected to street gang activity, and threaten only a tiny fraction of Americans. Just 2% of counties account for approximately 54% of all murders, and within those counties roughly two-thirds of killings occur within areas covering only about ten city blocks. By contrast, 53% of U.S. counties report no murders in a typical year, while another 16% report only one.

… and even within those 2% of counties, most of the county is perfectly safe. You just have to avoid the neighborhoods with obvious markers of a high crime area (boarded up storefronts, tents on the sidewalk, broken windows, excessive litter [especially drug paraphernalia], etc).

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Steve

July 10, 2026 at 5:45 am · Reply

I’m getting whiplash in regards to how the war in Ukraine is going. Half the articles I read claim the Ukrainian drone program is wreaking havoc inside Russia and it’s only a matter of time before Putin breaks. The other half claim the drone strikes are certainly doing damage, but are having little impact on the direction of the war. I have to wonder if both types of article are being written by propagandists for one side or the other, and neither type contains much truth.

https://unherd.com/2026/07/the-ukraine-wars-big-lie/?edition=us

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby.

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More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol.

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How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable

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The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response.

One thing I am certain of is the expectation that Russian’s will fold when the going gets tough, rather than doubling down, does not hold up to even the most cursory inspection of Russian history. If Putin loses power, it won’t be to a moderate who wants to end the war. It will be to a hardliner who wants to bomb European weapons factories supplying drone parts or outright nuke Ukraine.

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